The Hobbler And The Limper

Freedom Summer, they called it, the summer when three civil rights workers were murdered by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen. It was the summer after The Beatles splashed on to the American cultural scene and the summer of the '64 New York World's Fair. It was the summer when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the summer before Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater.

It was also the summer of the first decade where just about nobody in the USA got polio anymore, thanks to the Salk and Sabin vaccines which virtually eliminated the dreaded polio virus—little consolation to those already crippled by the disease, the ones with atrophied limbs and steel braces.

In the summer of '64, I was twenty years old and looking forward to my junior year in college. As in previous summers, I banged nails and hung sheetrock, working for my uncle Albert's construction company. I was his favorite nephew, my uncle used to say. Not only did he give me a summer job, he was always looking for a "nice Jewish girl" to set me up with—a friend's daughter or niece, a cousin's daughter or niece, a friend of a friend's sister. Well, you get the picture. None of these worked out for one reason or another, and a few I'd even call disaster dates. So I rolled my eyes one day after work when my uncle said in that big, booming baritone of his: "Barry, have I got a girl for you!"

"Uncle Albert," I said, "no offense, but I think you should call a moratorium on your match-making efforts. Thank you very much."

But he persisted. "Look, I know things didn't work out in the past. But this girl is different."

"Where have I heard that line before?" I said, my tone ringing with cynicism.

With a dismissive wave of his meaty hand, he said, "Listen, Barry, this girl is absolutely gorgeous. Remember that beauty in the Dr. Kildare episode last year, the surfer chick with epilepsy?"

"Yvette Mimieux?"

"Yeah, that's her. Honestly, she's not quite THAT striking but close, damn close. And she's real smart too, goes to Mount Holyoke."

A Yvette Mimieux lookalike at a Seven Sisters school? I didn't believe it. With few exceptions, girls who went to Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, Radcliff, et al were known more for their brains than beauty. And her name, Frannie Ottenstein, sounded even more divorced from the Mimieux image. No girl with the name Frannie Ottenstein looked like Yvette Mimieux. I mean, can you picture a Jewish girl with a name like that standing on the beach with a surf board? I couldn't. Now, Kathy Kohner, the original Gidget, was Jewish. She was even cute. But in Yvette Mimieux's league? No way.

Uncle Albert said she was the daughter of one of his building suppliers. He saw her himself when she came in the office with her dad. "She knows about you, Barry," he said. "I built you up. She seemed interested and she's available. So call her, boychick." When I finally gave in and he gave me her parents' phone number, he said, "But there is one other thing."

"Yeah, what's that?"

He hesitated. Then: "Oh, nothing. You'll find out. It's nothing serious."

Curious, I decided to call her. She had a lovely voice on the phone, soft and polite. We talked for close to an hour, mostly about school, plans for the summer, stuff like that. Like me, she had a summer job, worked in her dad's office taking orders. We grooved over the phone so well that I asked her out, and she accepted. "Well, I guess your uncle told you what I look like," she said toward the end of our conversation.

"Like Yvette Mimieux."

She chuckled. "So I've been told. People are surprised when they find out I'm Jewish. You know the old line, 'but you don't look Jewish'." But is that all he said? About my looks, I mean."

"That's all he said. Why, something else I should know?"

"So, he didn't tell you that...I've had polio."

"Oh. No, he didn't," I said, dropping my voice several octaves. Now I knew the 'other thing' that my uncle had mentioned.

"Look, Barry, you can back out of this if you'd like, I won't be offended. Some guys do when they ask me out on a blind date and I tell them, particularly jock guys like you. Your uncle told me you've been athletic all your life, that you still play lacrosse for your college team."

I debated what I should do. She was right in thinking that an active, sports-oriented guy like me would want a female counterpart for a girlfriend. At the very least, I'd want a girl who was healthy in body as well as in mind. Crass as it sounds, cripples need not apply. But just how crippled was Frannie?

"Are you...I mean can you—"

"Walk?"

"I didn't mean—"

"No, it's okay. I get that a lot. Yes, I can walk. But I do best when hobbling. If hobbling was an Olympic sport, I'd probably win gold." I sat there in silence, dangling the phone in my hand. "That was a joke, Barry."

"Oh, yes, of course," I said, forcing a laugh.

"I have an offbeat sense of humor, in case you haven't noticed. So, do we have a date?"

We had a date. Her seductive phone voice and upbeat, vibrant personality won me over. What the hell? It was one date out of my life. Besides, I didn't want to be one of those guys she mentioned who couldn't deal with someone with a handicap. Truth be told, though, it bothered me.

She lived with her folks in Belmont Estates, an upscale, predominantly Jewish post World War Two suburban development of mostly sprawling rangers set on equally sprawling lawns. Professional people lived here— doctors, lawyers, engineers and people like her dad who had made it in business. They could afford fancy schools like Mount Holyoke. Me, I went to a state university, a decent school but not on the Ivy level.

Blind dates can be innervating, and I was especially nervous about this one, not knowing quite what to expect. I had seen people whose bodies had been ravaged by polio, so my mind raced with possible scenarios regarding Frannie Ottenstein. Of course, there was always the possibility that she wouldn't like what she saw either. I was okay looking—slightly above average in height (five-foot ten), brown hair, brown eyes, solid athletic build from wrestling and lacrosse and the weight training I did over the summer to keep in shape. But I was no matinee idol. So if my uncle Albert had built me up to the point where she was expecting Rock Hudson or Paul Newman to show up, she'd be very disappointed.

An attractive, middle-age woman greeted me at the door. "Hi, you must be Barry. Come in. Frannie will be down in a moment."

Her name was Irene, Frannie's mom. She was of average height for a woman, and looked pretty good for one nearing fifty—trim, with short, light brown hair streaked with gray. David, her dad, a paunchy six-footer with a shock of white hair, came out of the kitchen and greeted me. We sat in the large, tastefully furnished living room, passing the minutes with casual, break-the-ice sort of talk. He talked a little about his business, his connection to my uncle Albert, etc. He asked me about school, summer plans, the kind of stuff Frannie and I had discussed on the phone.

"So, Frannie told me you know about her polio," he said. I nodded. "You know, she's had dates broken because of it, boys who can't tolerate girls with a handicap. Their loss. Of course, I'm prejudiced, but she's quite a girl." I nodded again, not knowing what to say. I sure wasn't going to tell him that I too almost bailed when she told me.

We both looked up at the sound of her making her way down the steps. She leaned slightly over the banister, holding tightly to the railing with both hands, taking the steps one at a time. Her face came into view before anything else. I smiled thinking that this time my good uncle got it right. She possessed the sort of beauty that turned the heads of both men AND women. Her thick, dirty-blond hair dropped below her shoulders, then curled at the ends—hair fine enough to appear in a Breck Shampoo ad She looked more Mimieux than Ottenstein, that's for sure. So much for stereotypes. She also wore a yellow summer dress hemmed just above her knees. As she came near the bottom of the steps, I could see the steel brace over her withered right leg, attached to a heavy brown shoe. Her other leg looked normal, beautifully shaped, what you might expect from a girl with adoring looks. In fact, everything about her looked "normal" except for her right leg. Of course, she didn't walk normal. In fact, she could barely walk at all unless she used her cane, which her mom handed to her when she came off the steps.

"Nice meeting you, Barry," she said, smiling broadly. She looked at me intently, assessing my reaction. I kept my eyes glued to her face, her beautiful, seductive hazel eyes and near flawless skin. She had that clean, scrub look, more akin to someone from Anglo-Saxon stock rather than the Russian-Jewish ethnicity she later told me was her background. I loved her easy, genuine smile and her voice, the same soft, engaging voice I had heard over the phone.

"Nice meeting you too, Yvette—I mean Frannie." She seemed to appreciate the humor.

Holding the cane in her left hand, she hobbled (as she told me on the phone) to my car swinging her braced stiff right leg, then leaning on her cane and stepping forward with her normal left leg. Instinctively, I reached out to help her. She frowned and pulled away, conveying by her sour expression that she felt insulted. "I'm perfectly fine," she said. I stepped back, trying not to look hurt, but she picked up on it. "Don't feel bad, yours was a natural reaction. I know you mean well, like all those others who do the same thing. But I can get around as well as anyone else, just not as fast."

We both liked Chinese food, so I suggested Jimmy Chang's. Being late June, it was still light out when we got there a little after seven. Jimmy's was getting crowded as it normally did on Saturday nights. Between munching on our won ton soup, egg rolls, kung pao chicken and fried rice, we talked. Typical of first dates, there were a few minutes of awkward silences. Overall, however, the conversation flowed nicely. Both of us were unsure what we'd do with our lives after college graduation. An English major, Frannie said she might attend grad school for a PhD to prepare for a teaching career. She also saw herself applying to law school. As a psychology major, I had no choice but to enter grad school if I wanted to make a career of it, and especially if I wanted to keep my student deferment. Thousands of American "advisors" were already in Vietnam, and it wouldn't be long before LBJ committed ground troops en masse for full scale combat operations. A student deferment could keep you from getting drafted and thus out of the mess. Neither of us had much to say about the war because we knew so little about it. Few Americans did at that time, unlike a few years later when the country would be deeply divided. Frannie said that much of the activism at Mount Holyoke centered on what some students there considered antiquated rules regarding curfews, alcohol use, men in the dorms, that sort of thing.

"So if I came up for a visit," I said, "you'd have to hide me under your bed if I wanted to stay late."

"Either that or stuff you under the blankets with me on top in case the dorm mother wandered in. Of course, my stuffy, pedantic roommate might give us away. But that's another matter." I made a mental note to look up the word pedantic.

We talked about my hypothetical visit in jest, but I sensed there were serious undertones to it. I liked Frannie, and she seemed to like me. And I especially liked looking at her, liked the way she brushed back her radiant hair as she talked, the way she blinked her eyes and moved her lips, thin but sensuous. She made me forget the polio thing; that is, until it was time to leave, when she grabbed her cane and hobbled out of Jimmy Chang's, down the street and into my car. I wished it didn't bother me, but it did. It wasn't even nine o'clock. I still didn't know what to do as I started up my red, '63 Ford Fairlane convertible. I could drop her off, chalk it up to experience and never call her again. Or, I could stick it out and see what happened. She seemed to be enjoying herself as much as me. It was refreshing being with a girl on the upside of the bell curve, someone whose intellectual depth went beyond what you'd find in mainstream fare such as like "Life" and "Look" magazines. She made me laugh with her wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor. And, as noted, she was so fucking beautiful. If not for that brace and her atrophied right leg...

"Listen," I said, "it's still early and this warm June evening cries out for a drive in the country. What say you?"

"Me say, drive on, captain."

With the top down, I headed north out of the city, past suburban subdivisions and into a rural part of the county that in twenty years would look something like Belmont Estates. But in the summer of '64, it was sparsely populated, a place of farms, patches of woodland and open fields that stretched for miles. We drove around for awhile before I pulled off in a wooded area by a gravel road that ran by a small lake. Zoning laws would keep this area undeveloped into the twenty-first century. After I cut the ignition, she said, "You move fast, Barry, taking me parking on a first date."

"Well, believe it or not, this is the first time I've parked with anyone on a first date."

"Right, huh huh."

"No, honest. I just thought we could resume our conversations out here. It's more relaxing."

And it was, too, with nothing to distract us but chirping birds and buzzing cicadas. It was cooler out here, prompting Frannie to drape a white jacket over her sleeveless dress. Since leaving her house, she hadn't said one word about her polio. Curious as I was about when and how she got it, I couldn't bring myself to ask. She left me an opening when she mentioned Barbara, her high school age sister.

"Lucky for her, she started summer camp after the Salk vaccine came out," she said.

"So, is that where you got it, at summer camp?"

"Yes, when I was nine. It was nineteen-fifty-four, a couple years before Salk's vaccine became widely available. Prior to that, I was like any other normal active kid, running and jumping, playing volleyball and softball and capture the flag. And I was good, too. Quite the athlete, my counselor told my parents. And then, in August of that fateful year..." She looked away and rubbed her eyes.

I reached for her hand. "Frannie, if this is too painful for you, we can drop it."

She turned to face me, laughed through her tears. "Don't be silly. I can talk about it, sometimes even without crying." She laughed again and reached inside her purse for a hankie and blew her nose. "So that's what happened. Fever, pain and chills, followed by partial paralysis and this hunk of steel I lug around every day. But I'm lucky compared with those iron lung cases."

"Did you return to camp?"

"I did, the following summer. Played sports, too. I didn't like the girls making special allowances for me, but I didn't have much choice. In dodge ball, they just lobbed the ball at me, afraid I'd fall if they threw it too hard. Same thing in volleyball. In softball, I got the extra slow pitch. Swimming was the only sport I could do almost as well as I did before polio struck. Like President Roosevelt did in Warm Springs, Georgia, I can walk close to normal in the water."

Her spunk and courage impressed me. She looked even prettier in twilight, and I got the urge to do more than just talk. "Okay, so you can walk unaided in water. How about kissing? Do you do that in cars on the first date?"

"Depends on the guy. If I like him enough, sure."

"And do you?'

"What do you think?"

"I think you're beautiful."

"Well, I think you're beautiful, too." She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around me. She tasted good and she smelled good, like fresh linen. I touched her face, ran my fingers along her baby-soft skin and through her silky hair, while absorbing the softness of her lips and her sweet, gentle kisses. My solar plexus tingled—I really liked this girl.

We smoothed for minutes before she said, "I like you, Barry. But if we're to continue to see each other, you can't ever feel sorry for me, okay? I've had too many guys interested in me for that reason, guys who feel compelled, if not obligated to take care of me, protect me. I can take care of myself. Understood?"

"Feel sorry for you? A super smart, super cute Mount Holyoke babe who uses words like pedantic? Never." She doubled over in laughter. Then I said, "What the hell does that mean, anyway?"

"Narrow, stodgy. A pedant is somebody who goes strictly by the book. A stuffed shirt, in other words. You're not one of those, are you?"

"Not me. But it kind of fits one of my lacrosse coaches. He's by the book to the point of absurdity. Anyway, you'll get no pity from me."

"Good. Then we'll get along just fine. Now, can we resume what we were doing? You're an awfully good kisser."

Frannie was an awfully good kisser herself, warm, affectionate, passionate. It was obvious that she had had a fair amount of experience, at least in that area, and I couldn't help but wonder how far she'd gone beyond that. At age twenty, I wasn't exactly a young Hugh Heffner. In fact, my tally as far as getting laid came exactly to one, and that was a year ago. Girls weren't as permissive back then, even college girls. And the ones that were had "reputations." The image of the "good girl" was still a girl that "saved" herself for marriage. By 1964, things had loosened up a little from the conformist Eisenhower years. But the so-called sexual revolution was still close to a decade away. I was as horny as the next guy, not above cruising the streets of the poorer sections of town with like-minded friends, on the prowl for easy pussy. Betsy, my tally of one, was one such easy, a "downtown chick" who didn't flinch when it came to putting out. She was a cute little blond, an eighteen year old high school dropout who lived with her divorced aunt and worked in a factory. We were from very different socio-economic and cultural worlds. Yet I liked Betsy, liked her for her body, yes, but also for her sweetness and honesty, her lack of pretension. But this was a girl with limited education, who lacked both the ambition and smarts to get ahead. Predictably, I got bored and broke things off. I felt like a cad because she was very hurt. The experience convinced me that ultimately what I needed was the whole package, a girl who could fulfill me on several levels.

Frannie Ottenstein seemed like a good prospect as I held and kissed her on that balmy June night. In succeeding weeks, I became more convinced of it. Her "handicap" became less of an issue with me. I couldn't completely overlook it. But her spunk and energy, not to mention her beauty, inside and out, more than compensated for it. She didn't shy away from activity that could bring attention to her condition. One night we went dancing (her idea), and I figured we'd slow dance and sit the fast ones out. Not! She did a mean twist, as well as a modified frug. We also used to run together. Aware that running was part of my training regimen, she insisted on joining me. She didn't run, she hobbled like she had told me, and it was the fastest hobble I'd ever seen. People on the track looked on admiringly, watching this hot babe, with her cane and leg brace, burn up the cinders.

Our sex life was confined to heavy make-outs in the car and on living room sofas, hers and mine. By July, I was swinging for the fences but coming up short. Third base was as far as she'd go. Liberal in other ways, she was the "good Jewish girl" when it came to pre-marital sex. Foreplay for others was endplay for us. But boy was she good at it! After a bit of experimentation, she developed a great sense of timing, fine tuning her mouth and hands to my rhythms, not averse to licking my cum. The girl knew what turned me on, and she wasn't shy about telling me how I could return the favor. Of course, I was all too willing to oblige. She had the nicest tits, firm B-cups that perked right up the second my tongue made contact with them. It drove her wild. Her tummy was just as sensitive. She loved it when I touched her there, when I ran my tongue along her stomach. Given the circumstances, I couldn't tell her I was a leg man. At first, I cringed at the sight of her atrophied right leg. To be blunt, it turned me off, the sight of it encased in that hideous steel brace attached to that equally hideous heavy brown shoe, at times a saddle style shoe. But then a strange thing happened. For some reason, I started to find it sexy in a fetish-like way. Being a psychology major, I attempted to analyze myself, to plumb the depths of my subconscious for an answer. Other than coming up with some vague notion of attaching her infirmity to feminine vulnerability, I didn't get very far. I figured I was one for the books, including those authored by "sexperts" William Masters and Virginia Johnson. But it was a good thing because it allowed me to drop my former inhibitions about pleasing her below the waist. On dates, she'd usually wear a dress. Cane in hand, she'd stand there in her living room or den, lift her dress and demand that I eat her pussy. "I'll whack you with my cane if you don't," she'd say in a mock threat. So I'd get on my knees, take her panties down, and go to work. She'd go nuts, writhing and moaning, gripping her cane and a chair for support. More than once, she lost her balance and toppled into my arms. Then she'd lie on the floor, legs akimbo, and I'd resume where I left off. I'd rub my hard cock over her clit, getting her off without fully entering her sacred chamber. She climaxed like a guy in that she came relatively fast. I'd heard friends' stories about their girlfriends who either couldn't climax or could but only after their partners expended an exhausting effort to get them there. With Frannie it was easy.